Wednesday, 6 November 2013

If you are looking for a quality, frequently updated, one-stop blog about comics, you can easily go to Todd Klein's.

Klein is probabily the most awarded letterer in the comic book industry, and deservedly so.

While lettering has often been seen as a painstaking and inherently rewardless job (not to mention labor-intensive), Klein managed to make it in to an art form.

To be fair, calligraphy is actually always been a respected craft thru history, but in comics it never had the opportunity to shine.

Publishers and editors tried at different times to revert to typographed lettering (I'm not sure that's the way you call it, but forgive me while I look for the correct word to use), but it never stuck. It seems comics can only accept hand-made lettering (or at least a computer lettering that looks like it has been designed by hand)

Thanks to a number of titles that required (or at least allowed) the letterer to be creative, Todd Klein specialized in creating unique fonts and modes for a number of characters and since became the letterer of choice for many prestige books.

But it is unfair to label Kelin simply as a letterer, he is one of the few people in comics who can actually do anything: writing, drawing, logo design, inking, coloring, editing...

The blog is more about his reads, his travels and also his job, but it is but a section of his Website, which includes essays and documents on how he does his stuff.